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Date:      Tue, 30 May 2000 02:15:01 -0500 (CDT)
From:      "James A. Mutter" <jmutter@colltech.com>
To:        mat@cs.mcgill.ca, gabriel_ambuehl@buz.ch
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   FreeBSD Diskless
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.21.0005300203320.22077-100000@psasolar.private.psa.pencom.com>

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I was searching through the archives and I noticed your question about
diskless booting.  I too am working on a solution with PXE and Intel
Pro100 cards.

So far I've managed to use a combination of PXE and ISC's dhcp v3Beta
to load the "pxeloader", which in turn loads a kernel over NFS, which
finally mounts an NFS_ROOT partition.  However, after the root partition
is mounted everything goes south.  If I export a copy of the BSD root
filesystem (/bin /sbin /dev /var /tmp /dev /stand) from a Solaris box
nothing works, the kernel complains it can't find "/sbin/init" or
"/stand/sysinstall", the filesystem is export rw as
"/data/bsdfs".  However if I export "/" from another BSD box everything
seems to work fine, this is not an acceptable solution though as I can't
have multiple boxes doing read/writes on the same root fs.

As I've mentioned before I'm trying to work towards a solution where I
can:

(a) boot "pxeloader" using PXE 
(b) boot customized kernel
(c) run a scripted sysinstall for an automated installation.

If anyone's ever user "boot net - install" and Jumpstart (Solaris Sparc) 
you'll know exactly what I'm working towards.

I guess I just wanted to share my experience with this PXE thing and
solicit any advice/experiences that others have had.  If we can get this
right we've taken a huge step in remote management for FreeBSD (and other
Intel) servers.

--
Jim



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